Describing herself as a ‘multi-hyphenate’ person, writer-actor-podcaster-comedian Anna Leong Brophy has thus far managed to achieve success across multiple fields, but with her new show Born Sexy Yesterday she’s now turned her attention to tackling the Fringe for the very first time as a solo act.
“I’m feeling really great and I’m also feeling terrified,” she says of the prospect of embarking on her first solo Edinburgh Fringe run. “This is my debut solo show, but I’ve done several shows before as part of a double act. So when I was thinking of doing something on my own, I was thinking about what would this show actually look like. Would it be just plain stand up? Or it could be character comedy or sketch or clown or theatre – because I have a theatre background as well. But I was just so sick of dragging around a giant bag of props. So I thought, ‘this is going to be a stand up show.’” She pauses and laughs. “This is not a stand up show!”
Named after a problematic media trope, her show, Born Sexy Yesterday, has been described as ‘exploring sci-fi, sexuality, and the roles women are allowed to play, both on screen and off.’ But what influences went into the creation of the show and is Anna a sci-fi fan herself?
“Well, I’m married to a sci-fi fan and so that was when I started watching certain things like Star Trek, and I was like ‘what the hell is all of this?’ And I used to do a podcast with my double act partner Emily Lloyd-Saidi and that was about watching movies and asking if they were still legit.
And I realised that I had really been quite defensive about The Fifth Element, which was one of my favourite films growing up. And she brought up the ‘born sexy yesterday’ trope and I was doing that thing where you’re like ‘No, it’s fine because I like it, so it’s got to be fine!’ And then later on I was like, no it’s not fine, I’d drunk the Kool-Aid on it.”
The trope in question often involves a female character with the body of an adult but the naivety and mindset of a child. It often emphasises a woman’s physical aspects at the expense of giving her a well rounded character with any sense of real agency. A trojan horse of misogyny in some ways.
“A lot of the skills these sorts of characters have tend to be really valued by men. Like driving really fast cars or being able to fix things. You can’t have all of these elements all at the same time alongside this complete virgin mindset. And, y’know, someone who’s just landed in a body is a virgin in every single way. They’ve never eaten a sandwich, they’ve never had sex, they’ve never kissed anyone, they’ve never been like ‘why don’t you take the bins out for a change?’ They have no point of comparison at all. And I think it’s interesting that it’s so prevalent in male fantasies to be completely unchallenged.”
But what was it about this particular trope that struck a chord with Anna?
“I had really taken on this idea that I should be kick-ass, but totally ethereal,” Anna explains, “and as soon as you start to dig into what’s behind it and how it really is about men who want women to be blank pieces of paper that are completely unthreatening, that do not challenge their worldview, and these films sort of make that seem okay. But that’s not okay. I went to a costume party years ago dressed as Leeloo from The Fifth Element because I was like ‘she’s love, she’s the fifth element!’ But no, she’s a baby! So I really did get suckered into that mindset.”
Anna’s show addresses these types of tropes head on, using comedy and theatricality to skewer and bring attention to the often troubling implications tropes like ‘born sexy yesterday’ contain.
“The way I approach it is as a ‘born sexy yesterday’ character. I’m born on stage, basically. And then you spend the show with her as she’s trying to find her way through the options available to her. A bit sort of Inception style. She keeps thinking she’s broken through a particular trope and that she’s free, but each one is essentially a sort of cage. And each time she’s like ‘but hang on this is the exact same Madonna-whore thing I was dealing with in the first place!’ And so there’s lots of fun to be had with many tropes. But it also deals with how tempting it is to stay within the same safe space that patriarchy has created for you where you feel valued. So that was part of the reason why I started to make the show.
But it was also the feeling of growing older and looking ahead of me and seeing that there were no female role models that were just aging, growing, learning, and becoming elders. And that really shook me, and it does worry me. Because I don’t like the thought of what will become of our society without any female role models that are saying ‘growing old is a privilege, learning and acquiring knowledge, and making mistakes and learning form those mistakes, is a privilege.’
“It sounds really fun, doesn’t it?” She laughs. “It’s funny and silly as well, I should say.”
I wondered why this was the medium Anna had chosen to tell this kind of story. Could it have worked as a screenplay or perhaps straight stand up?
“I think it definitely could be a film or a play and there was a point when I almost thought it would be a play, but for me, I love storytelling and I like a certain amount of theatricality in my work, so as much as I envy stand ups, I love character work. I think there’s something about me, because I’m such a forceful strident person, I don’t want to berate people for an hour like, ‘Feminism! The Patriarchy!’ But this way, I get to be playful and explore all these elements. I like to serve things up to people and let them make up their own mind. Like ‘you recognise this trope and it’s up to you how you feel about it.’ I hope the audience gets X-ray specs once they see the show and realise that ‘Oh my God, I am seeing that everywhere!”
Anna has also had tremendous success writing for children and has had the privilege to work with Aardman, writing a Bafta nominated script for Shaun the Sheep. I wondered what it was like to work with Aardman and just how one went about writing a script for a show with no dialogue?
“It’s a completely different type of script. There’s amazing vocal work, but there’s no spoken dialogue. It’s like the Mr. Bean of stop-motion. So what’s particularly challenging and interesting about that as a writer is that you then have to figure out how to convey things without resorting to dialogue, which I do love doing. The episodes I was working on was about one character disappearing. Again, it’s a bit like my show, a kind of multiverse story, jumping through all these alternate realities. But trying to convey the absence of something without dialogue and for a younger audience as well is really challenging.
“Working with Aardman is a dream. It was an amazing experience. They are fantastic. The love and care that is taken with Shaun the Sheep is so real. It’s real! Everything is so lovingly crafted. It takes so long to make even one episode. It’s like the anti-Tik Tok.”
“It’s a funny old career that I have really,” she reflects.
Does she feel the constraints of writing for children, particularly on a show with no dialogue, helped to hone skills which she could then apply to her own solo show?
“There’s something about the immediacy of the jokes in Shaun the Sheep. There’s a lot of very quick visual gags and they are economical. They are so economical. They’re like ‘how do we make this punchline land in the most satisfying way in the least frames possible?’ So, yeah, there’s definitely elements that I’ve brought into my new show where I want to be able to supersize this meal and get as many tropes in as I can to scratch all those little itches. Being able to use physicality, a look, a sound, just a very small thing that people can find relatable.”
And how did she get into comedy in the first place?
“I got into comedy because I trained as an actor. I grew up in London in Brent, very multi-cultural. I think it may be the most multi-cultural borough in London. And I just thought ‘I’m normal!’ And then I went to drama school and they were like ‘You’re not normal! You’re foreign.’ So then I went through drama school and came out the other side and was like ‘I’m looking forward to all those parts I’m going to get’ and then pretty quickly got hit with this reality that people did not see me as just like a regular person. So I wasn’t getting much work at all. So I started doing improv. I trained under Ken Campbell. He was a huge influence on my life. He was just so ‘have a go’ and irreverent and such a passionate person. Whatever interested him, he would take a deep dive into it. He really shook me out of this feeling that as a young woman you have to just look like a pretty ornament all the time. Now I realise I was very fetishised as a young East Asian woman. And he just didn’t give a shit about that.” She launches into a spot-on Campbell impersonation. “He was like ‘You look too pretty! I want you to look stupid. Really fucking stuuuupid!”
“But it was so freeing. I did improv particularly with him and that was very wild and wonderful. So then I started an improv troupe called BattleActs! in the spirit of what I’d learned with Ken. And we did about ten or eleven Fringes.”
All of which lead Anna towards forming a double act partnership with Emily Lloyd-Saini.
“For both of us, we’re both mixed race, and we were like ‘How do we get in? How do we get through this door?’ We thought we could walk through it in terms of acting, but nobody was letting us in and so we were just sort of rattling the lock. And the Fringe and comedy is just a different landscape. It’s so much more accessible and it gives people an opportunity to see you as a funny person and it puts a film over the ‘otherness.’ Instead of people asking where you’re from, they’re just like ‘Oh, she’s funny!’
“The biggest challenge with this new show was trying to figure out how to have a conversation when there’s not another person on stage to have a conversation with. And how to make that flow through the audience. And how to do that when the other person is not a fixed entity. It’s a bit of an unknown. So I’ve really enjoyed that actually. So I’ve got several different ways of interacting with the audience and having those conversations, so it’s like playing a different tune on different strings.”
With so many strings to her proverbial bow, what is it about performing comedy that keeps drawing Anna back?
“It’s just a completely different thing to be in front of a live audience, to be creating your own work rather than serving some big machine. And to just be saying what you want to say with your own sense of authorship. I really need it. So comedy keeps coming to my rescue.”
So what’s next for Anna?
“I’m a theatrical person and now I can see that it comes in all different parts of my life. I like art that’s theatrical, I like music that’s theatrical. It turns out I’m always gonna be dragging around a giant bag of props.”
Anna Leong Brophy’s will be performing her new show Born Sexy Yesterday at the Edinburgh Fringe from 7-30 August at the Pleasance Courtyard – Below
Tickets available here: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/anna-leong-brophy-born-sexy-yesterday
By Danny Lamb
